Boston is a great city. ~ Frederick Douglass

I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate... ~ Frederick Douglass

Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. ~ F. B. Zinckle

See also: Boston (band)

Boston is the capital and largest city of the state of Massachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), in the United States. Boston also serves as county seat of the state's Suffolk County. It is the largest city in New England. The city is the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country.

One of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston was founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan colonists from England. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston. Upon American independence from Great Britain, the city continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub, as well as a center for education and culture.

Quotes

• And this is good old Boston,
  The home of the bean and the cod.
  Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
  And the Cabots talk only to God.
  • John Collins Bossidy A toast given at Holy Cross College alumni dinner in 1910. McPhee, John. Giving Good Weight. p. 163. 

• Boston is a great city - and Music Hall has a fame almost as extensive as that of Boston. Nowhere more than here have the principles of human freedom been expounded. But for the circumstances already mentioned, it would seem almost presumption for me to say anything here about those principles. And yet, even here, in Boston, the moral atmosphere is dark and heavy. The principles of human liberty, even I correctly apprehended, find but limited support in this hour a trial. The world moves slowly, and Boston is much like the world. We thought the principle of free speech was an accomplished fact. Here, if nowhere else, we thought the right of the people to assemble and to express their opinion was secure. Dr. Channing had defended the right, Mr. Garrison had practically asserted the right, and Theodore Parker had maintained it with steadiness and fidelity to the last. But here we are today contending for what we thought we gained years ago. The mortifying and disgraceful fact stares us in the face, that though Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill Monument stand, freedom of speech is struck down. No lengthy detail of facts is needed. They are already notorious; far more so than will be wished ten years hence... Even here in Boston, and among the friends of freedom, we hear two voices: one denouncing the mob that broke up our meeting on Monday as a base and cowardly outrage; and another, deprecating and regretting the holding of such a meeting, by such men, at such a time. We are told that the meeting was ill-timed, and the parties to it unwise... To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money. I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate this right. But in order to do so, there must be no concessions... [U]ntil the right is accorded to the humblest as freely as to the most exalted citizen, the government of Boston is but an empty name, and its freedom a mockery.
  • Frederick Douglass, Plea for Free Speech in Boston (8 June 1880)

• Our people are timid, desponding, recreant whimperers. If they fail in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at the Cambridge Divinity College, and is not ordained within a year afterwards in Boston, or New York, it seems to his friend and himself that he is justified in being disheartened and in complaining for the rest of his life. A sturdy New Hampshire man or Vermonter who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these Boston dolls. My brave Henry here who is content to live now, and feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life but lives already—pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry (27 May 1839).

• Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), VI.

• Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. Boston therefore is often called the "hub of the world," since it has been the source and fountain of the ideas that have reared and made America.
  • Rev. F. B. Zinckle, Last Winter in the United States (1868).

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